Contemporary Ballet's Roots: From Judson Church to Ballett Frankfurt

Contemporary ballet didn't emerge from inside ballet. Its foundational ideas came largely from outside the form entirely — from modern dancers who wanted nothing to do with ballet's technique or its theatrical conventions — before being carried back into ballet-trained companies by choreographers willing to cross that line. This is the first half of that story: how a rejection of virtuosity in downtown New York eventually reshaped what a ballet-trained body could be asked to do.

Judson Dance Theater and the Postmodern Rejection

In the early 1960s, a loose group of choreographers, visual artists, and musicians began staging performances at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, New York. The group — which included Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and others working alongside composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham's circle — became known retroactively as Judson Dance Theater, and their work is generally treated as the founding moment of postmodern dance.

Their central move was a rejection: of narrative, of trained virtuosity as a value in itself, and of the theatrical apparatus — sets, costumes, formal music — that both classical ballet and established modern dance relied on. Yvonne Rainer's 1965 "No Manifesto" articulated this explicitly, refusing spectacle, virtuosity, and glamour in favor of pedestrian movement and task-based structure. None of this was ballet, or even aimed at ballet audiences. But it built a toolkit — walking, falling, weight-sharing, improvisation as compositional method — that would eventually migrate into ballet-trained companies through later choreographers who studied or admired this work.

Release Technique and Contact Improvisation Enter the Vocabulary

Two specific developments from this period became especially important to contemporary ballet's later vocabulary. Release technique, developed largely through the independent work of Joan Skinner and Mary Fulkerson in the 1970s and drawing on Alexander Technique and other body-awareness practices, emphasizes using gravity, breath, and momentum to initiate movement rather than holding the body in fixed classical alignment. Contact improvisation, developed in the early 1970s and largely credited to Steve Paxton, is built around two or more bodies sharing weight and momentum in real time, generating partnering that looks unplanned or physically risky compared to formal classical pas de deux.

Neither technique originated in ballet, and for years they stayed confined to the modern and postmodern dance world. But as choreographers trained in ballet began encountering this material — often through cross-training or collaboration rather than formal inheritance — release technique and contact improvisation's underlying principles started showing up inside ballet-trained companies, laying groundwork for everything that followed. Our glossary covers both terms in more detail.

1973: Pina Bausch Reinvents German Dance Theatre

The first major figure to carry this spirit of formal rebellion into a resourced, institutional dance company was Pina Bausch. Trained at Germany's Folkwang School under Kurt Jooss — a pioneer of Ausdruckstanz, or German expressionist dance — Bausch took over the dance company at Wuppertal's civic theatre in 1973, renaming it Tanztheater Wuppertal and leading it until her death in 2009.

Bausch's Tanztheater treated spoken text, repetition, and everyday gesture as choreographic material with equal standing to formal dance vocabulary — closer in some ways to the Judson choreographers' rejection of pure technique than to anything in the classical ballet world, but staged with a theatrical scale and emotional directness that was entirely her own. Works like The Rite of Spring (1975), performed on a stage covered in soil, and Café Müller (1978), with its blind, stumbling figures repeatedly repositioned by others, established a template that has influenced nearly every choreographer profiled on this site, whether or not they trained with her directly. Bausch's rehearsal method — asking dancers deeply personal questions and building choreography from their answers — became almost as influential as the resulting works themselves.

Kylián's NDT: A Rigorous Third Way

While Bausch was reshaping German dance theatre from Wuppertal, a parallel project was underway in the Netherlands. Nederlands Dans Theater, founded in 1959 by dancers who broke away from the more traditionally structured Nederlands Ballet — the company that would later, after a 1961 merger, become Dutch National Ballet — found its defining artistic voice under Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián, who served as artistic director from 1975 to 1999.

Kylián's project was distinct from Bausch's theatrical rebellion: he built a technically rigorous, athletic style that combined ballet's precision with a much wider vocabulary of weight, fall, and floor-based movement, positioning NDT as neither a purely classical company nor an experimental modern dance troupe, but a genuine third category. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, NDT became one of the field's most important training grounds, developing dancers and choreographers who would go on to shape contemporary ballet at companies worldwide — including, eventually, Crystal Pite, who later served as an associate choreographer there.

1984: Forsythe Arrives at Ballett Frankfurt

The final piece of this foundational story took shape in Germany. In 1984, American choreographer William Forsythe — who had trained in classical ballet in the United States before joining the Stuttgart Ballet in 1973 — was appointed director of Ballett Frankfurt. Over the following two decades, Forsythe carried out a systematic interrogation of classical ballet's own rules: its alignment, its geometry, its relationship to music.

Unlike Bausch's turn toward theatre or Kylián's expanded athletic vocabulary, Forsythe's project stayed rooted inside classical technique itself, pushing it past its textbook limits — off-center balances, joints displaced from "correct" alignment, phrasing that argues with rather than illustrates its score — using dancers trained in exactly the vocabulary he was deconstructing. Starting in 1994, he worked with researchers to document the geometric principles behind this method, eventually released as the training tool Improvisation Technologies in 1999. Because his vocabulary was built from classical technique rather than a separate discipline, it proved unusually portable — ballet companies with no other connection to Forsythe's own lineage could stage it convincingly, which is a large part of why his repertory became a fixture of contemporary ballet programming worldwide.

By the mid-1980s, these four strands — Judson's rejection of virtuosity, Bausch's dance theatre, Kylián's athletic rigor, and Forsythe's deconstruction of classical technique from within — had established the basic vocabulary that contemporary ballet would keep developing for the next four decades. Part two of this essay, Contemporary Ballet Goes Global, picks up the story from the 1990s onward.